Well, it’s back-to-school time again, and this year we’re going to be looking at one of the biggest schools in Anime, Academy City.
In terms of what’s got shows, Academy City is the setting for three separate shows with seven seasons of material between them: three seasons of A Certain Magical Index, three seasons of A Certain Scientific Railgun, and one season of A Certain Scientific Accelerator. The series as a whole is typically referred to either as RailDex (after Railgun and Index) or Toaru (after the common word translated as “A Certain” in the titles), but it’s also easy to think of them by their common setting.
So, what is the setting and, for A Certain Magical Index, what is the story?
Academy City is a city-state with a population of millions, most of which are students. A large part of how this is able to be is that Academy City has advanced science not known in the rest of the world. Not only are conventional disciplines at least twenty years ahead, but students of Academy City are able to engage in the city’s special training regimen to become Espers, individuals with unique abilities derived from science.
Espers are graded in levels, ranging from Level 0, who don’t have anything recognizable as powers, to Level 5 Espers (of which there are only 7) who wield powers that make them the equivalent of whole armies.
Our main character in this world is Toma Kamijo, a high school student who may be Level 0 on paper, but who does possess a special ability that’s not exactly an Esper power: called Imagine Breaker, this ability means that any unnatural power his right hand comes into contact with, it destroys. Toma also has a soft touch and terrible luck, both facts that tend to get Toma into trouble. In addition to being stuck in remedial classes with his friends and child-like teacher, he also seems to become frenemies with Mikoto Misaka, also known as “The Railgun”, a hot-headed little tsundere with a strong sense of justice, who also happens to be one of the Level 5s.
Of course, then the plot falls into Toma’s life in the form of a little blue-haired girl in a nun’s habit. She introduces herself as Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index for short), and makes a few crazy claims: That magic is real, that she contains the complete text of 103,000 magical grimoires in her head, that she’s being pursued by enemies, and that the last fact doesn’t matter because her habit is an indestructible magical artifact that will protect her from all harm. Naturally, her desire to display the invincible power of her artifact gets it disintegrated by Toma. He did warn her.
This ends up seeing Toma’s home attacked by a couple of magic-users out for Index. One is Stiyl Magnus, a massively tall dude who looks like he wandered out from being the anti-hero of a 90’s action movie and uses a good deal of literal firepower, including summoning a powerful elemental being called Innocentus. The other is Kaori Kanzaki, a “saint” who also has an fashion sense that should be dated and yet is somehow timeless in its insanity, and otherwise seems to fight hard with her magic katana. The two of them work for a secret branch of the Church of England, which also purports to be the church Index is affiliated with.
Over several battles and a few misunderstandings, it comes out that the two of them are actually trying to help Index, believing that she needs to go through a ritual to erase her human memories every year or the storage capacity of her perfect memory will max out, resulting in her death. However, a little scientific medical knowledge reveals this to have been a lie from church superiors, who wanted Index’s memory erased regularly to keep her a magic tool storing the grimoires rather than a person with wants and needs of her own. However, freeing her from being mind-wiped is easier said than done, as the church’s high-ups also scribed her with magic to turn her into a dangerous puppet in the event she was left out too long. Toma, with the power of his right hand, manages to dispel the magic, but it does come at a cost, as he straight-out tanks an arcane blast powerful enough that, when misaimed, it even takes out a satellite in orbit over Academy City (a cool shot in the battle with Possessed Index and a plot point for later). This ends up, in something of a fit of irony, costing Toma his memories due to brain damage: for the rest of the series, he’s ignorant of anything before waking up in the hospital at the end of this arc, even though he hides that fact quite well. Stiyl and Kanzaki, who really wanted what was best for Index over any other priorities, become friends for future appearances, and we move on to the next arc.
A Certain Magical Index is, when you get down to it, very much a Shonen-Action-Harem sort of affair, and so it should be no surprise that we open the new arc by introducing a new girl: Aisa Himegami, a foreign Esper whose ability uniquely touches on the magic side of the world, as it attracts and kills vampires. She’s come to Academy City both because Academy City could possibly help her understand (or remove) her deadly power and because, since magic and science are opposed in this universe there are unlikely to be any vampires (creatures of magic) in the stronghold of the science side.
Himegami meets and befriends Toma, and shortly after Toma learns that she is in danger from an evil cram school taken over by a rogue alchemist with ties back to Index. Toma and Stiyl go on a rescue mission, facing down against the Alchemist, who has the magical power to make what he believes to be true into reality. Toma is ultimately able to turn that power against him, as the alchemist comes to fear Toma, and his out-of-control magic makes him see a more and more intimidating monster until, at last, he falls. In the wake of this, Himegami is given a talisman that seals her ability, but remains in Academy City to study normally.
Instead of introducing a truly new girl, the next arc (the “Sisters” Arc) focuses on someone we’ve met: Mikoto Misaka! This arc ends up being hugely formative to the series as a whole, introducing plot and setting elements that will come up again and again, acting as a defining moment for Mikoto’s character, and introducing Accelerator. While this is kind of a big deal for A Certain Magical Index, the arc is even grander in A Certain Scientific Railgun, so I’ll be going over it in more detail from her perspective.
From Toma’s perspective, he meets Mikoto for what is basically the first time (seeing as he doesn’t remember her), and also meets her… sister? Said sister is a little off, looking almost identical to Mikoto, referring to herself in third person as “Misaka”, and so on. After taking care of a stray cat with her for a bit, Toma finds her missing… and then finds her bloody, mangled corpse. He calls the cops, but the scene is cleaned up before they arrive, and he even runs into Misaka again, who reveals more of the truth: She, the one Toma has been interacting with, is Misaka 10032, one of twenty thousand clones of Mikoto who are, for the sake of a science experiment, being killed in secret battles with Accelerator, the top-ranked of Academy City’s seven Level 5 Espers. Toma learns this truth investigating the situation, and ultimately catches up with Mikoto, who has been trying to stop the slaughter and make amends herself.
Mikoto’s plan involves the nature of the project. It turns out that Academy City’s infallible supercomputer, Tree Diagram, calculated that that of the current Level 5 Espers, only Accelerator was capable of reaching the theoretical, godlike Level 6. To do so, he would have to exercise his powers by defeating Railgun in mortal combat several hundred times, but in the absence of several hundred Railguns, substitutes would have to be prepared. And, thanks to a previous program that a much younger Mikoto was suckered into donating her genetics for, they could provide 20,000 weaker copies instead. Quickly grown in vats and given intelligence with an artificial brain-programming system, the Sisters share their thoughts and memories, and would thus ultimately provide the exercise Accelerator would need to evolve.
Mikoto, for her part, has learned all of this, and additionally that Tree Diagram has since been destroyed (it was the satellite wrecked in the Index fight), which means no new calculations can be made. She intends to cast doubt on the former calculations: Tree Diagram predicted she could go over a hundred moves against Accelerator, so it should result in a reassessment (which can’t be done) if she dies in a measly two moves, essentially trading herself for the remaining nearly 10,000 clones
Toma, of course, isn’t willing to let someone essentially innocent and good-natured march to her doom, and thus goes with Mikoto to challenge Accelerator over the life of Misaka 10032.
The resulting fight is particularly intricate and involved. Accelerator lives up to his rank, and his power (controlling the vectors of anything he touches) both makes him invincible against any sort of conventional attack, reflecting them effortlessly, and gives him plenty of attacks that can actually threaten Toma, since heavy objects thrown at him aren’t subject to the Imagine Breaker.
Accelerator, here, is also a particularly heinous crazy villain. He’s got one of the greatest maniacal grins in Anime and a vicious attitude that adds to his intimidation factor, which is important when from a physical perspective he’s a teenage boy with the build of a scarecrow, so not the most intimidating figure ever put to screen.
As the battle rages, Accelerator even taps into new depths of his ability, teaching himself how to manipulate the air itself and threatening to kick off nuclear fusion until a coordinated effort from the Sisters disrupts him and Toma, despite being beaten to within an inch of his life, manages to land the finishing punch that sees Academy City’s #1 defeated by a Level 0 nobody.
Before letting the Sister Arc go entirely, I did want to mention something that’s prominent here, but is kind of throughout the entire Toaru series: the fact that this series has a very loose relationship with numbers.
The prime example of what I mean here is Accelerator’s kill count. We see him fight the Sisters, and even though he probably could, it’s not like he obliterates them in one move. We also know from 10031 and 10032 that there are at least several hours between dead Sisters. It seems like, from what we witness, he could probably get through three or four of them a day… which would have taken him seven years to get through the lot. Side information suggests he’s been at it for much less time, a year or two at the greatest and possibly not even one depending on other details. For two years he’d need to get through 14 Sisters every day, which would be a fairly stocked itinerary. It’s not strictly impossible, but it doesn’t quite line up with what we see.
In a similar way to Sci-fi writers often having no sense of scale when it comes to space stuff, Academy City usually plays it fast and loose with facts that feel right for a moment rather than ones that check out in retrospect. In addition to raw numbers, this sort of gets involved in continuity as well. Academy City seems to handle multiple existential threats, many of which level entire city blocks, on a daily basis, and yet none of them ever notice the other incidents. Similarly, injuries only persist as the plot demands: Toma gets torn up every week at least, but a quick trip to the hospital where he can be cared for by a certain frog-faced doctor and he’s fine for the next arc. The start of Index I through the end of Index III is July 28 through October 30, and in that time Toma breaks more bones, loses more limbs, and otherwise ends up in the hospital more times than most people do in their entire lives. Despite this, once the arc ends, he’s ready to go even if the actual timeline only advances a single day.
Quite simply, I don’t think you’re really supposed to take Academy City too seriously. These stories can be better or worse, but they’re always exercises in theme and excess, about the amazing things that they can show you rather than any sort of higher art. And, frankly, I kind of love it for that. There’s something beautiful and refreshing about the fact that the great aspiration of this series is to entertain rather than anything else.
After the Sisters arc, we move on to a strange little arc that, like Himegami’s arc, is a little light on long-term repercussions. The weird part is that there’s actually some really great material in it. The story of the arc is that, though only magical-types and Toma seem able to notice, everyone in the world has had their appearances swapped around due to an event known as Angelfall – which, as you might guess, is supposed to be the result of an angel being pulled down from Heaven. At the same time, Toma has a little bit of a break and is invited to spend it at a beach house with his family, a family that due to his Index-induced brain damage, he can’t actually remember.
This leads to a good deal of clowning around and funny scenarios where the face of someone we know is seen on someone with a wildly different personality, as well as some good scenes with Kanzaki as she essentially throws her hat in the harem ring. Eventually, it turns out that Toma’s father triggered Angelfall on accident: he collected souvenirs from across the world and brought them home, and his arrangement of those objects created a powerful ritual site that cast the spell despite no one intentionally nor with knowledge doing it. Of course, some of those on the magic side still want to kill ‘the culprit’ to set everything right.
That number, in the end, includes the Angel, namely the archangel Gabriel in the body of a Russian priestess named Sasha Kreutzev. Kanzaki fights Gabriel while Toma ultimately ends up burning down the house, breaking the ritual site and ending the spell.
Upon returning to Academy City, we take a bit of a break for side stories. One involves Toma being browbeaten into a “fake” date with Railgun and having to face down an Aztec sorcerer who would be more of a threat if he hadn’t fallen for Mikoto to the point of jeopardizing his anti-Toma mission in order to keep her safe.
The other side story, though, ends up being rather pivotal. Neither Toma not Index really appear as significant characters, instead giving us a couple episodes focused on none other than Accelerator.
This arc, which isn’t even a particularly long or meaty arc, is in my opinion possibly the most impressive sequence in Index I, which is saying something when the show has so many fancy battles and weird magical moments. Why? Because it manages to function as an extremely effective redemption arc for Accelerator, who had otherwise seemed like a fairly irredeemable psychopath.
We open with Accelerator going about his business, after the end of the project (Level 6 Shift) that saw him slaughtering the sisters. He’s no less invincible than ever, but he’s both lost something of his purpose and now finds that every punk and his brother wants to take a swing at Academy City’s top dog, hungry for a chance at Toma’s glory. We see him get accosted going to and from a convenience store for his meals, pretty much marching on with depressed resignation, and returning to his apartment with even more legitimate depressed resignation since it’s been ransacked while he was out. This is implied to just sort of be Accelerator’s life now: all the power in the world, but nothing to do with it and very little in the way of it doing anything for him.
This changes when a very different annoyance approaches Accelerator: Last Order, the 20,001st Misaka clone (apparent age: something adorable) and locus of the Misaka Network, who has come to him for help in her time of need.
This might raise a few questions, like why there’s a mini-Misaka clone (she wasn’t exactly done cooking) or, more interestingly, why she would approach Accelerator when she has the shared memories of being killed by Accelerator 10,031 times. Accelerator asks the latter question himself, and the answer is quite the excellent reframing of previous events.
Last Order notes that, in all the memories, Accelerator always asked the clones if they were ready for the next experiment, and further sees a method in his taunting savagery: Last Order sees it as Accelerator having done everything he could to confirm that the Sisters were “wind-up dolls” as he and they were both told, perhaps hoping that he’d hear otherwise, that one of them would say she wasn’t ready, or ask to not be killed, which none of them ever did. In Last Order’s mind, Accelerator’s actions prove that he wanted out of Level 6 Shift even more than they did. While Accelerator, still a gruff and prickly person, denies her assessment, the degree to which it gets under his skin suggests that she’s not off-base.
In any case, Accelerator more or less does some of what she asks (since she’s looking for an incubator tank), getting in contact with one of the more kindly researchers who was involved in Level 6 Shift. However, the real problem is more complicated than getting Last Order to a clone vat to keep growing: one of the other surviving researchers, in an attempt to cover his tracks, has infected Last Order’s brain with malicious code that, if it continues to run, will kill her and, through her, the rest of the Sisters. And, wouldn’t you know it, he managed to nab Last Order while Accelerator wasn’t paying attention, hoping to keep her brain alive until the virus can do its dark work.
Accelerator and the kinder researcher head to the rescue, with the researcher having an incomplete counter-code. They recover Last Order, but too late for the technical code-patch to be applied. For a moment, it seems like the situation has only one solution: if Last Order is killed before the virus fully activates, the rest of the Sisters will be spared. It’s a solution that should be easy for Acclerator… but showing his true quality, he takes the hard way instead. After all, he’s the strongest Esper there is, capable of controlling the vectors of all things – objects, air, and even light with his passive reflection. If he tries hard enough, rewriting the bioelectric signals in Last Order’s brain in order the erase the blooming mind virus… won’t be easy, consuming all of his focus, but it will be possible.
As Accelerator is about to finalize his work, though, he notices something in the world around him: the desperate researcher who implanted the virus, pulling a gun. In a split second, Accelerator has to choose: he can resume his reflection, easily taking no hurt from the bullet just like everything else that’s ever tried to take him down… but if he does that he’d scramble Last Order’s brain like an egg.
Accelerator finishes his work on Last Order regardless of the danger, and takes a bullet through the brain for his trouble. Thanks to that choice, Last Order and the other Sisters survive, but Accelerator doesn’t get the customary Academy City end-of-arc reset: the Frog-faced doctor is amazingly skilled, and called the “Heaven Canceler” for his astounding life-saving capability, but there’s only so much he can do with borderline catastrophic brain damage: Accelerator survives, but on his own his speech, motor, and calculation abilities are all gone, leaving him little more than a vegetable and unable to use his ability. There is one out, though: an electrode that connects him to the Misaka Network, farming out the tasks that the lost parts of his brain would perform to the vast computing power of the surviving Sisters, making Accelerator dependent on the girls he once slaughtered by the thousands in order to continue living even a normal life.
This naturally has some pretty huge ramifications for Accelerator in the future, particularly in his own show, but for now we leave him here and return to actual main character Toma.
The next arc is the last for Index I. It features Toma and his crew (Himegami, Index, and Railgun) meeting up with each other and mysterious new girl Hyouka Kazakiri. Typical fare, but it also more aggressively than previous arcs introduces the meta-plot of A Certain Magical Index, including our longest-term antagonist (or at least that’s what he comes off as), Aleister Crowley, the legendary British magician and, at the same time, the founder and secret master of Academy City.
At first, it seems like the big problem (aside from a larger-than-average dose of harem antics) is the arrival of another magical terrorist in the city: Sherry Cromwell, an angry lady with a golem. Before she shows up, Hyouka gets a good chance to befriend everyone (especially Index), as if Toma wouldn’t have protected her from a terrorist attack against an underground mall without knowing her. Still, the low-key stuff this arc is actually pretty good.
Once Cromwell attacks and it all hits the fan, Mikoto’s teleporter friend, Kuroko, gives us a funny moment where she has to decide what two people to teleport out of danger. Everyone agrees at first that Hyouka should go, but Index is unwilling to leave Toma alone with Railgun, and Railgun is unwilling to leave him alone with Index, leading Kuroko to remove the two belligerents.
While Toma and Hyouka are alone, they encounter and spar with Cromwell, the fight revealing that Hyouka, unknown even to herself, isn’t human: she’s an artificial angel, the manifestation of the psychic fields of all the Espers of Academy City acting together. Of course, Toma has the right words to get her to pull out of existential depression, and ultimately battles both Cromwell (with Hyouka) and her golem (with Index as well), ending the threat.
However, even with the crisis resolved, Hyouka starts to fade away, her reality not yet solid. It’s not necessarily the end, though, as she’s merely returning to the plane known as the “Imaginary Number School District” and will see her friends again some day. Crowley babbles about all being according to plan, and Index I ends gracefully.
Index II opens with a one-off episode dealing with another random sorcerer who wants Index for more-or-less (this time, less) nefarious purposes, easing us back in. After that, we’re able to launch into the next major arc.
One thing worth noting is that Index II and III, compared to Index I, have a much greater focus on their meta-plot, and that more or less kicks off right here. The technical plot of the arc is that Toma is recruited to help a Roman Catholic force lead by a nun named Agnese rescue another nun, Orsola Aquinas, who has supposedly been taken captive by a different church (called the Amakusa, who were led by Kanzaki in the past. Yes, despite the fact she’s canonically not much older than Toma. Among the things that the Index series does that have a loose relationship with reality is how it plays with the ages of these characters) after learning how to translate a ciphered tome known as the Book of the Law, about which there are some very dark predictions.
Of course, this turns out to be a little backwards, and after helping out part of the way, Toma learns that Orsola actually fled from the Catholics to the Amakusa, since the Catholics would kill her to prevent the Book of the Law from being translated properly. This leads Toma and Index to work with the Amakusa (including a nice Amakusa girl called Itsuwa, who goes on to become another love interest for Toma, and a surprisingly effective one at that), rescuing Orsola and getting her placed under the political protection of the Church of England, while Index reveals that the method Orsola discovered is one of many false decipherings, and that the true text of the Book of the Law remains secret.
We take another short break, then, to deal with a lower deck problem: The last remnant of Tree Diagram is recovered from orbit, and everyone wants a piece of it including Railgun (who wants to destroy it in order to be sure Level 6 Shift can’t be restarted with new math) and shadowy forces who choose as their hand in this matter a Level 4 teleporter named Musujime Awaki (Aka, by her ability name, Move Point). Mikoto’s friend Kuroko (also a level 4 teleporter, though with different advantages and drawbacks) also gets involved, in part due to her affiliation with the student law-enforcement group Judgment, and ends up in a pretty awesome teleporter-versus-teleporter duel with Move Point, which ends with Kuroko hurt bad enough that she actually spends a few arcs in a wheelchair and Move Point getting away with the prize… but not for long before she encounters an irate Accelerator, acting on behalf of Last Order and the Sisters, who puts the hurt on her and destroys the remnant in his few seconds of re-appearance.
From there, we get another attack by the Roman Catholic Church against Academy City, this one attempting to use an artifact that would convert the land and the people on it forcefully. Most of the situation is a cat-and-mouse game with a mercenary magician, Oriana Thompson, who’s traveling through Academy City to make preparations and possibly an artifact hand-off. Oriana proves to be a slippery foe as well as a willing and eager source of fanservice.
The struggle takes place during a major festival in Academy City, which sees visits from both Toma’s parents and Mikoto’s mother (much to Toma’s embarrassment and our Level 5 Tsundere’s horror), getting us quite a few good scenes in the down-time, but more than that it provides set pieces for the struggles against Oriana. During the hunt, Oriana ends up hospitalizing one of Toma’s friends from school with reckless magic and nearly killing Himegami on mistaking the crucifix talisman that seals her Deep Blood for the mark of an enemy. Toma gets his chance to punch out Oriana (one thing to appreciate: when faced with a ruthless female villain, Toma doesn’t pull his punches. While Kazuma might have espoused ‘true gender equality’ it is good, regardless of any consideration like that, to recognize a powerful foe as a powerful foe) and the day is saved by Academy City’s fireworks messing with the celestial targeting requirements of the artifact.
Toma, thereafter, ‘wins’ a trip to Italy and goes on vacation (with Index as a tag-along plus one) and gets embroiled in yet another evil scheme of the Catholic church to overthrow or destroy Academy City, this time with a fleet of magic ice ships called the Queen of the Adriatic Sea and originally intended to do their magical WMD thing to Venice. Dealing with the fleet involves re-encountering Orsola and Itsuwa (who were cleaning out her apartment in Italy when they ran into Toma) and more than that, Agnese, who’s being held captive on the ice fleet, damned for her former failure and set to be used as a sacrifice for the magic effects. Toma finds out who he has to punch and who he has to give a friendship speech to, does it, and ultimately sinks the magic ice fleet’s core ship with the help of Agnese and the Amakusa.
This then leads into a long arc that serves as the climax (but not quite the end) of Index II. It starts innocently enough, with Toma and Mikoto “pretending” to be a couple so that they can get couples’ cell phones that come with a promotional item Mikoto really wants (a matter she feels she can force since Toma lost a bet around the festival), Accelerator getting re-socialized after being let out of the hospital, and Toma and Accelerator each losing track of their annoying little girls, Index and Last Order, and finding the other’s counterpart. This bit is actually quite amusing, as it goes a long way to show how Accelerator has changed since his villain days. It’s not just that his powers are limited by the battery life on his electrode (which, if he wants to use his ability, can only hold out fifteen minutes), it’s also that his bad attitude is even more obviously a cover or defense mechanism than ever, as seen when he deals with Index, who doesn’t know who he is and ends up regarding him as the nice boy who helped her.
I’ll have a tangent on that later, but it’s best held for after the plot summary at this point.
Things break, though, with the arrival of Vento of the Front, the first member we’re seeing of a secret Catholic group with over-developed magical powers, a “four classical elements” theme for no discernible reason, and authority that might be above and beyond even that of the Pope. They’re called the Right Seat of God, and the rest of them will be showing up in Index III, but for now we’re concerned with Vento.
And, if you thought Accelerator looked absolutely psychotic in his villain run… he did, but Vento’s design and maniacal grin gives even his a run for its money, not the least of which because one of her magic implements is a cross on a chain attached to a tongue stud. That’s… creatively insane, as you’d expect of Index’s style-over-substance approach.
Vento storms into Academy City, even going so far as to kill members of the governing board in her opening salvo, provoking a response from Crowley. We get a very long and complicated action run where Vento is trying to destroy Academy City by putting everyone in the city (at least everyone who’s not a main character or villain badass) to sleep, after which impaling spikes will be conjured to finish the population off. Meanwhile, a man associated with Level 6 Shift, Amata Kihara, comes with his army of mercenaries to obtain Last Order. Kihara actually manages to fight off Accelerator, since he knows Accelerator’s power inside and out to the point where he’s able to ‘fake out’ Accelerator’s normally invincible reflection defense. Desperate, Accelerator uses his power to send Last Order away on the wind, even though he’s about to be killed himself. That’s about when Index arrives, though, distracting Kihara and his goons long enough for Accelerator to commandeer a car and get himself and Index on the fast track to the hospital. Meanwhile, Last Order lands near Toma and he ends up protecting her from the goons coming for her after an abortive attempt to save Accelerator (who Last Order never properly named and who Toma hasn’t encountered since the Sisters arc.)
Over the next stretch, we pretty much see everyone facing everyone else, capped off by the reappearance of Kazakiri. Toma deals with Vento and the goons (the latter of which does get ahold of Last Order), Accelerator ditches Index at the hospital and goes on a rampage with guns because he’s close to out of ability charge, Vento squares off against one of Toma’s friends (a magic/science double agent), and Accelerator even throws an apartment complex at Crowley’s lair when he realizes the governing board is probably behind snatching Last Order.
Last Order is used to (with the Misaka Network as repeaters) force Kazakiri into a fully angelic mode, in which she begins to radiate a field that causes magic-users to take damage from using their magic, severely weakening Vento and threatening to spread across the world in retaliation for the attack. Toma collects Index and runs into Mikoto, at which point the three split up again, Mikoto taking on armed forces, Index going for Last Order as the source of the forces controlling Kazakiri, and Toma heading to face Vento and Kazakiri at the center of it all.
In the meantime, Accelerator also goes for Last Order, ending up fighting Kihara for round 2. During this, his battery bottoms out utterly, but Accelerator keeps on trying with barely any motor skills to his name, going after Kihara like a zombie. Index arrives and, with some advice from Mikoto (got over the phone) uses a magic song to disentangle Last Order’s brain and restore her to normal. This also manages to power up Accelerator, who sprouts black “wings” (they look more like energy tornadoes) that give him enhanced versions of his power at the cost of being, seemingly, even less sane than usual. In this state for a moment at least, he launches Kihara so hard that Kihara burns up in the atmosphere on his way out like a shooting star in reverse.
Meanwhile, Toma manages to do his usual thing with Vento, questioning her motives, giving her a good talking to about not giving into myopia and despair, and then punching her out to end the threat she poses. He also manages to comfort Kazakiri as she comes to her senses (before she fades away again). Another member of the Right Seat of God retrieves Vento, and lets Toma end her huge divine punishment spell on the way out.
For Accelerator, the outcome is not so rosy. His empowered state didn’t last long, and the powers that be make him an offer he can’t refuse to start working for them.
We follow up with that in the next arc, seeing Accelerator teamed up with Move Point, Toma’s double agent friend, and the Aztec sorcerer with a crush on Mikoto as one of Academy City’s elite “Dark Side” organizations, GROUP.
With his electrode improved but able to be disabled from ability mode remotely, Accelerator cuts his teeth on a little wetwork dealing with a group of disaffected Level 0 thugs called Skill-Out, who were much more relevant in the Railgun series. While destroying them, though, he learns of a plan to use the dregs of Skill-Out to kill Mikoto’s mother in order to prevent her from pulling Mikoto out of Academy City, and decides to save her mostly out of spite for his employers. Toma also ends up running into the woman in question, and gets involved in the Skill-Out attack on her whereabouts. Accelerator helps her and shoots up a lot of goons (his abilities being locked off) while Toma then gets her out, giving a heroics speech and punching out to a particular Skill-Out (former) member we’ll be seeing a lot more of in Index III, Hamazura. Between all that, Mikoto’s mother decides that with such nice boys looking out for her, she’ll feel comfortable leaving Mikoto in the city despite the rumors of unrest abroad (and direct evidence of unrest at home. I’m not 100% sure how this plot was supposed to make sense).
And it’s with that little episode-and-a-half tail that we play out the second season of A Certain Magical Index, and the scope of this week’s review.
Before moving on, though, it’s time for analysis. Let’s start with the tangent I alluded to earlier, Index’s character. Or, specifically why the titular character of the show is reliably the worst part of the show.
The fact is that Index is largely a living McGuffin whose characterization is limited to two jokes: she bites Toma when she’s upset with him (often with a comedic chomp sound effect), and she is always hungry or concerned with where her next meal is coming from. And sometimes these jokes can be funny, even on multiple levels. In the moment I referenced earlier where she’s being taken care of (temporarily) by Accelerator, he takes her to a restaurant and, for the only time in the series, Index is actually allowed to eat her fill – in some ways highlighting that Accelerator is actually capable of generosity as sour as he may be, and otherwise getting a bit of a laugh by inverting her normal bit. More of the time, however, these stock bits aren’t particularly funny or charming. You hear her calling Toma’s name and you know she’s going to either be hungry or be offended and bite him, possibly one and then the other, and certainly which she’s leading with by her tone. And she does nothing else outside of crisis scenarios.
Even in crisis scenarios, she’s a pretty minor piece. I can think of one time when she does something that both involves taking agency and shows some character in an action sequence: taking on Sherry Cromwell’s golem in the last arc of season 1, in which she got kind of inventive and made the most of her situation in a pretty great way. Most of the rest of the time she doesn’t contribute a whole lot, either defusing some very precise magical threat with her grimoire knowledge (like temporarily disabling Agnese’s battle nuns or singing for Last Order) or using an ability called “Spell Intercept” to redirect the magic of other casters. When, normally, our lead character can kind of handle magical threats with Imagine Breaker.
In all that, we don’t know much of who Index is as a person. I guess she’s kind of childish and has a short temper, but what does she like? Dislike? She’s really just those two jokes. Comparing her to another character like Mikoto or Kanzaki, Index is flat and shallow. And, of course, it doesn’t help that she gets annoying as well.
In some ways, it’s a shame, because I have reason to suspect the issue is induced by the adaptation. In a novel, you’d have time to have Index do her running gags, and also say something meaningful or in a colorful way rather than spouting exposition or getting kidnapped. In a show, though, her screen time is harshly limited, and especially as the cast inflates and the saga wears on, she’s left with only enough time each appearance to do her jokes and get out the absolutely plot-relevant details. Something usually has to give when going from print to animation, and that something seems to have been Index’s personality.
So, what about the other characters? Mikoto Misaka is a ton of fun when she gets screentime and showed a good deal of depth, which is probably why she got her own spinoff show in which she’s far better than she ever is in Index. Toma, for his part, is a very standard protagonist. He’s got the conviction to fight, but he’s also nice and will generally spare the lives of his foes, even when it costs him and even when they were trying to kill him. In his personal relationships he trips into comedy routines constantly (which is at least explicit this time around with his “bad luck”) and is generally chivalrous and extremely dense when it comes to the affection he receives from a broad spectrum of female characters, meaning the Harem contest can continue. As for the other characters, there are few of them that really distinct themselves. Kazakiri, Himegami, and Orsola are the kind of characters who are fun for a little while. Kanzaki has a little more meat to her, at least, and Accelerator is pretty great in his redemption arc and the final arcs of Season 2, but almost everyone else is a fairly accessory presence. Some, like Toma’s tiny teacher, are more fun while others, like Stiyl, are less, but they’re all too far out of focus to really get growth or development.
On another topic, the Academy City shows are the kind of scifi/fantasy that can feel a little like homework, because there are a million complex explanations for every cool power or magic spell, which the characters feel compelled to go on about in the middle of combat. That’s something that’s kind of a “love it or hate it” choice, and it is much more intense on the explanations in A Certain Magical Index as opposed to the science-side shows. Some of this is needed. Especially when Toma, who’s good at no-selling most magical powers, is on the field it’s good to know what his opponent can do and how it might be able to hurt him if he can’t or doesn’t intercept. And that’s not counting the explanation of evil plots or counters thereto that take place in more peaceful moments, since those are generally fairly important.
Still, it is a large volume of exposition to get to doing cool things, and it can cause some sequences in Index to drag. While there are explanation-heavy conflicts that flow well and feel good, it’s not quite as smooth as, say Unlimited Blade Works, so the best sequences are the ones where you already got the exposition or didn’t need much, like the battle with Accelerator at the end of the Sisters arc, and there are more like that in the Science shows than in Index itself because Esper powers are fairly straightforward compared to magic spells, at least in this setting. Esper abilities tend to be able to be described in short sentences (“Misaka controls electromagnetism”) or single words (“Teleportation”) with perhaps more granularity when it comes to the scope and limitations of the particular Esper’s. The magic-side stuff , by comparison, tends to need lengthy bits about their origin and lore, as well as their effects (“A spell that causes people to fall unconscious if they bear any ill will of any form towards the caster, including indirectly – such as hearing about a dangerous intruder who is the caster and fearing ‘the intruder’. This works because the caster is, pierced with iron, made in the image of Christ on the cross and thus acts as a substitute for divinity, meaning that the ill will is taken as being directed towards God and therefore worthy of punishment. Unconsciousness is achieved by magically limiting the victim’s oxygen intake in order to induce a state like hibernation without causing asphyxiation or permanent harm. The spell might have multiple levels of response force, and will maintain the punishment until the caster decides that punishment is no longer desirable or the spell itself is disabled at its core”)
Does the magic feel more magical that way? Probably. Does it sometimes make events a little hard to follow? Absolutely. With the pace in Index I and II it’s not that bad, but if the show were to run at a faster pace, it would probably mean losing the plot at times in the middle of all the magical techno-babble.
That’s foreshadowing, by the way.
So, at the end, I chose to lump the first two seasons of A Certain Magical Index together because they seemed to deserve about the same rating: B. They have similar strengths in their action and style-over-substance experiences, and similar weaknesses in their ability to enter technical overkill and the obnoxious presence of the titular character. I suppose I’d recommend them, but my fondness for A Certain Magical Index in particular is only lukewarm. The first season is probably a hair more worthwhile, if only for its version of the Sisters arc, but they’re both in a state where you could take or leave the show as a whole depending on your own proclivities.